You may have heard of Vine, the 6-seconds video app from Twitter. Following on the same footsteps, Instagram had introduced a 15 second video capability in-built in the application. On similar lines, we have AirGol, an Indian application which which gives it’s users the ability to record a minute long video and share it with your friends. Founded by Baati Mittal, the product from Ongraph Technologies had participated in MobiSparks StartUps.

How does AirGol mobile app work?

The application by default opens up in landscape mode on mobile and allows you to sign up via email or Facebook. The application also allows users to start recording videos without any signups to begin with but while syncing the video one needs to create an account. The users are then greeted by a ‘How It Works’ Video which can take you through the beginner steps to use AirGol.

Once I connected with my Facebook account, I could start recording the video. When starting up, the app asks if you would want to keep the video private (not seen by anyone else) or public (will be available to be seen by everyone on the AirGol website).

AirGol Video Recording

The videos can be a minute long and once recording is stopped, you can add tags to the videos so that discovery becomes easy along with assigning the video to different categories. The generated video could be shared on Twitter/Facebook/email and the provision of downloading the video is also available.

AirGol tries to be a video sharing community in itself where you can view what’s ‘Trending’ and ‘Latest’ at the moment by clicking them underneath the Browse feature. The feature ‘Following’ allows people on the network to know what they are recording and sharing on the application. Besides this one can read or insert comment on the videos and this feature is also available if you click on the ‘Comments’ section underneath the Engage option. ‘About’ and ‘Comments’ provide relevant details of a particular video selected on the network.

AirGol Interface

Airgol web app

The web app which has similar login features allows you to view the videos uploaded by the user, friends video and public videos. The web app lists features on how the business could use the services provided by the startup. Along with details businesses can sign up for a free trial version too. One very interesting feature that is missing in the mobile is the easy listing of categories so that a user can view the videos on his interests, watch them, leave a comment, share them or follow the user to build the network.

How good is the app?

Overall, AirGol right now does not look like a perfect application (or alternative) if you are someone using Instagram (Or Vine) UX/feature wise. The application does not have multiple burst option which allows you to pause/start recordings to have the best result and expects you to record the videos at one go. User experience needs to be worked upon, it may be confusing for a new user to gain access to his own recorded videos which can be visible if you click at the top right hand corner of the app with a unconventional icon. There could be a direct shortcut on the left navigation bar for easier access. A search feature could also help on the mobile app.

The application on Android has crossed more than 10,000 downloads and has got an average rating. AirGol also offers solutions for business and not just individuals with a simple, secure and scalable cloud based video-as-a-service solution. Businesses would not need any infrastructure and will have a pay-per use solution in which they can integrate live and recorded videos on their websites to have customer engagement with integrated rich media in place.

However, if AirGol is targeting a global market, they might have to tweak their user experience and bring in much required features for better navigation along with the play-pause option to record, to beat the likes of Vine and Instagram on a global scale.